Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 261

Photostat

Mitch Fraas (@MitchFraas) on Twitter (click photo for link)

this one’s for Austin Kleon

It will be asked, How is imitation to be rendered healthy and vital? Unhappily, while it is easy to enumerate the signs of life, it is impossible to define or to communicate life; and while every intelligent writer on Art has insisted on the difference between the copying found in an advancing or recedent period, none have been able to communicate, in the slightest degree, the force of vitality to the copyist over whom they might have influence. Yet it is at least interesting, if not profitable, to note that two very distinguishing characters of vital imitation are, its Frankness and its Audacity; its Frankness is especially singular; there is never any effort to conceal the degree of the sources of its borrowing. Raffaelle carries off a whole figure from Masaccio, or borrows an entire composition from Perugino, with as much tranquillity and simplicity of innocence as a young Spartan pickpocket; and the architect of a Romanesque basilica gathered his columns and capitals where he could find them, as an ant picks up sticks. There is at least a presumption, when we find this frank acceptance, that there is a sense within the mind of power capable of transforming and renewing whatever it adopts; and too conscious, too exalted, to fear the accusation of plagiarism,—too certain that it can prove, and has proved, its independence, to be afraid of expressing its homage to what it admires in the most open and indubitable way; and the necessary consequence of this sense of power is the other sign I have named—the Audacity of treatment when it finds treatment necessary, the unhesitating and sweeping sacrifice of precedent where precedent becomes inconvenient.

— John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture

biblioteca

Susannah Hays, Sacra Theoloigie

well, back to work

Daniel Stier, Ways of Knowing

Correggio’s deception

It being lawful to paint then, is it lawful to paint everything? So long as the painting is confessed—yes; but if, even in the slightest degree, the sense of it be lost, and the thing painted be supposed real—no…. In the Camera di Correggio of San Lodovico at Parma, the trellises of vine shadow the walls, as if with an actual arbor; and the troops of children, peeping through the oval openings, luscious in color and faint in light, may well be expected every instant to break through, or hide behind the covert. The grace of their attitudes, and the evident greatness of the whole work, mark that it is painting, and barely redeem it from the charge of falsehood; but even so saved, it is utterly unworthy to take a place among noble or legitimate architectural decoration.

— Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Unique to Ruskin is the combination of an exceptionally acute aesthetic sense with an exceptionally acute moral sense, and this is one of the many moments when they struggle mightily against each other. Ruskin cannot help admiring the beauty of Correggio’s work here, but he is so deeply opposed to deception in art that he wishes he could reject it altogether.

house

An abandoned house on the Isle of Scalpay

this is the future liberals want

some clarifications

Over at Mere Orthodoxy, Jake Meador responds to this post of mine — but I believe Jake misunderstands what my post is about. He reflects at some length on “mere Christianity” idea and whether it is tenable, or whether by contrast it can compromise the strength of particular traditions — but I don’t say anything about that in my post. Jake goes on to say that “Dr. Jacobs seems to suggest that there is an old First Things that essentially lived exclusively in the living room of the Mere Christianity house” — but I didn’t suggest that and I don’t think it. FT was at its best a place where people from different traditions in Christianity and Judaism (and even, very occasionally, Islam) could engage in serious conversation with one another, and what made the conversation serious was the fact that the participants held firm to the convictions arising from their traditions, even when those convictions separated them in some ways from other participants.

The point of my post is much simpler: if a magazine claims to be “interreligious” and yet (a) is run completely by people in one wing of one religion and (b) publishes essays that defend the claims of that tradition over against all the other traditions supposedly represented in the magazine, but never publishes essays that call that preferred tradition into equally serious question, then there is a dissonance between what the magazine says it is and what it actually is. That’s all I am saying.

One more point: Jake says that Comment is Reformed and has a Reformed “spin” on things, but I am not Reformed, and I believe that there are other members of the editorial board who would not describe themselves as Reformed either. So I think Comment at least has the possibility of becoming more genuinely ecumenical than the “Reformed” moniker would suggest.

text three ways

When my buddy Austin Kleon posted his notebook turducken I realized that I have a three-part system too, though a somewhat different one:

I use a small Moleskine planner for my calendar and tasks, a Leuchtturm notebook for ideas and drafts, and index cards for reading notes (including notes I make for the books I teach). It would of course be possible to put all of this in one notebook, but such simplification would come at too high a price. For instance, with my current system I have a place where I keep track of my events and tasks for an entire year, but if I did that in the notebook where I also write drafts, then when that notebook was full I’d have to make a new calendar no matter what point in the year I’m at — and then lose ready access to the old calendar. Similarly, when I have reading notes on index cards, I can spread them out and look at them as I’m writing drafts, which is much better than having to turn back and forth to multiple pages in multiple notebooks.

On Erik Stevens

I am breaking my Lenten silence because (a) I am a poor excuse for a Christian and (b) I can’t stop thinking about Black Panther. The movie had some flaws — chief among them, I think, the exceptionally poor CGI, which is really unforgivable in a film that depends so much on CGI — but the story is the strongest, most coherent, and most meaningful one of any film in the MCU.

But you know what could have made it even better?

Let’s consider Erik Killmonger for a moment: a man whose justifiable rage at injustice (against him and against the world’s black people) has turned him into a psychopath. We see him kill several people he doesn’t have to kill, and Lord knows how many more of those there are in his past. He is, as T’Challa says, a monster (and, as T’Challa also says, one of Wakanda’s own making). But what if he weren’t a monster?

Imagine an Erik Stevens with all of the same warrior’s skills and commitment to justice who channels his rage into strategy. Who understands the fear of the ruling families of Wakanda and seeks to win them, and the people as a whole, over to his side. Who has a dream, a dream of liberation for black people around the world, and of Wakanda as the agent of that liberation — and who can powerfully and passionately articulate that dream.

He’s never going to win over Shuri, of course. But while she may be the only supergenius, she’s not the only brilliant scientist/technologist in Wakanda. Others might well rally to King N’Jadaka, seeing his plan as one that could make them famous and influential — could make them, literally, world-changers. The new King would also have the Dora Milaje on his side — something even Killmonger manages, before he throws that boon away — which would be a powerful visual manifestation of his kingship.

What then? Could T’Challa hope to reclaim his throne when such a king has claimed it, and, according to the laws of Wakanda, rightfully claimed it? Would he not go down in Wakanda’s history as the weak son of a weak king, capable of no more than scrabbling to preserve Wakanda’s secret wealth, lacking compassion for the world’s oppressed black peoples, lacking the vision to bring Wakanda to its proper place on the world stage, as a king among nations?

That probably wouldn’t be good for the MCU franchise, of course (though I can imagine some interesting possibilities). But maybe T’Challa as tragic hero, destroyed by Nemesis, would be the best T’Challa of all.